The high end of the art-book market is flourishing, but traditional titles in
the middle market are in steep decline – Rupert Christiansen knows
who's to blame

Last Tuesday at the National Liberal Club, this year’s Art Book Prize was awarded to Peter Brunt and Nicholas Thomas’s Art in Oceania, published by Thames & Hudson.

The book is as beautiful in its way as the objects it describes – a 500 page door stopper, lavishly designed and illustrated with more than 400 colour photographs, edited and written by leading scholars in the field.

Retailing onAmazon for less than fifty quid, it would sit equally happily on your coffee table or on the shelves of a university library.

Yet during an era when technology is busily redefining the Gutenberg orthodoxies, one can only wonder what future there is for such splendid volumes, requiring as they do heavy investment that can reap only limited commercial rewards.

Two leading art book publishers, Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press and Jacky Klein at Thames & Hudson, gave me their prognosis.

At some levels, they agreed, this area of the market is holding up surprisingly well. So far, there is little competition from e-readers and Kindles, which have yet to crack the problem of combining text and images.

Some thrilling apps that can whirl you round 360 degrees and link you to distant cyberspace are in the offing, but currently they cost so much to develop that they aren’t financially viable.

In any case, the art book is in retail terms a luxury item, something with which one enjoys an almost slaveringly sensual relationship: we don’t just turn its pages, we treat it as a treasurable ornament or offer it as a generous gift. Significantly, Thames & Hudson has no trouble selling signed and limited edition monographs of fashionable artists such as Grayson Perry and Cornelia Parker at £100 or £150.

There are growth areas, too, not only in emerging markets such as India, China and Brazil, but in disciplines such as graphic design, photography, architecture and, most encouragingly, art books for children.

It is the middle market that is in steep decline: Yale has seen plummeting sales of traditional art-history fields such as the Renaissance andImpressionism. Today’s art students are more interested in Twombly than Titian.

Physical production costs, surprisingly, are not the major problem: printing now takes place largely in super-competitive and efficient China, paper stocks are currently plentiful and digitisation has made image-making much cheaper.

The art publisher’s bigger bugbear is reproduction rights: bills for books such as Art in Oceania can run into tens of thousands of pounds, as copyright fees have to be paid to artists or their estates, as well as to the photographer or agency controlling the image and the institution that owns the object. There is no agreed scale, and people who should know better seem out to grab as much as they can (the National Galleryis regularly excoriated for its high demands).

So if the art world wants to help save the art book from extinction – and after all, it offers a hand that feeds its profits – the most useful step it could take would be the regulation of reproduction charges.